Harri Salminen/1991-05-27


NORDUNET Engineering and Technical Forum Network Management working group


Status and current activities

Quick survey has shown that most of the new network management systems
available today are based on SNMP. Many network management needs
however cannot at least yet be met by standard SNMP products. For
example DECNET on DEC equipment requires special DEC software. IBM NJE
uses non-standard IBM or EARN developed implementation dependent tools
and protocols. All X.25 equipment has different proprietary or at
least non-standard management support. The LAN-layer in NORDUnet at
least is managed by yet another set of proprietary tools. The list can
be continued to the application layer where even standardisation
efforts for management don't often exist.

The ideal situation would be one distributed NMS to manage all types
of relevant services. Co-operating NOCs should be able to easily share
management information even if they used different products.

The group has started to write a requirements document that will be
used to evaluate existing and future products and standards. The first
part of the document lists objects and their properties that would
benefit from network based management. This includes standard and
proprietary services and protocols from physical layer up to
application layer and beyond. References to standards will be made
instead of reinventing new MIBs whenever applicable. The second part
of the document will contain the desired general functionality from an
ideal network management system that could be used to manage the
objects mentioned in the first part. This includes support for
multiple protocols, users and management domains at the same time.

Some members of the group have participated in the RIPE and IETF
activities related to network management but both have different much
narrower scope aimed in producing recommendations and standards for
Internet.

Planned activities

The writing of the requirements document will continue and based on it
a a network management scorecard might be produced to aid in the
second phase in which the members of the group will use the document
to evaluate existing products and produce an evaluation report. If
seen appropriate the report might be published in relevant forums.
After that, possible further co-operation with product and standard
developers might occur to further the goal towards the ideal
situation. Of course the ideal situation is always in the horizont and
can never be achieved but without common ideals there would be no
common direction for improvements.